My book of the year 2025. Incredibly inventive five star sci-fi horror.
Wow what an opening, what an idea. Set in a world very close to ours, except there is a growing infestation of antimemes - entities that feed off your memories, eat your identity, destroy our reality without us noticing. ("I have a pet monster" lol.)
We are placed with Marion Wheeler, a mid to high ranking pencil pusher with a difference. She's in antimemetics, an organisation tasked with investigating, controlling, and preventing antimemetic outbreaks. But as the most dangerous ones know when you're thinking about them, and they hate being seen. Marion and the team need to work in secret, from everyone else and themselves. It's quite the trip, and becomes genuinely scary.
Originally a set of online short stories by qntm (Sam Hughes), they work really well collected together. The whole book is short but packs so much in - even the structure, broken and fuzzy, adds to the vibe. You become entangled in the experience.
Early on we watch an unfortunate victim as he falls into a trap, his memories and knowledge consumed. It becomes clear he can't escape once caught. But he has an agonising amount of time to make progress with the puzzle, just like previous victims before it's over. This is just the start, there's a whole history, a new chemistry, and a global fight to explore.
"How do you win without realising you are at war?"
U-2135 can't be thought of without killing you and is quietly manifesting itself through the story. Putting the clues to its existence together only gets you seen, inadvertently ending the fight. And the fight is becoming more desperate as time goes on. Again, what an idea - the chemical & physical steps required to wage this war are wonderfully thought out. Our heroes can only run away and obliterate their memory of it. But people keep rediscovering it. It is like launching the Apollo programme without asking any questions about what the moon was.
It can be very funny too. U-2200 - a lying stone who eats the memories of bicycles - was the best. In "The bicycle cycle" he tells people bikes have been invented many times, it is just that he has eaten any memory of them. Brilliant as you just can't tell if it is true in-world or not.
The writing is first-rate, very British and perfectly pitched for the division. "Discordant, feral" Proper. Feels like MI5.
The final sections are quite the departure, fitting a tragic but beautiful story of love and sacrifice into a satisfying final fight. Watch out for Chekhov's smoking antimeme.
"Humans can walk away from, and forget anything."